Trending

Archives

We’ve all seen lawmakers yammer on and on about how they want to “streamline” government, or “save the taxpayers money.” But they rarely show us much for all the talk. Paul Woolverton, writing this weekend in the Fayetteville Observer, noted one such lapse after the North Carolina Senate voted to

A scientist has a problem: no problem. Sounds like a Zen riddle, but it’s really about the riddle of victimhood-worship. Emily Yoffe writes an advice column called Dear Prudence. A female reader reported a problem pertaining to workplace bias against women. Although she works in a “very masculine scientific field .

“Is repealing the Affordable Care Act an issue of manhood?” asks Alan Rappeport in the New York Times. He’s referring to the “macho language” in a resolution introduced recently in Jefferson City, Missouri, by State Rep. Mike Moon. Moon’s House Resolution 99 decimates the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave cautious support for the anti-vaxxer cause a few years ago. No scandal. But only now that Republican politicians Chris Christie and Rand Paul have talked about the risks of (as well as of parental rights and responsibility regarding) childhood vaccination has the issue of

“I should have been an engineer,” climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer laments. “I went into science with the misguided belief that science provides answers. Too often, it doesn’t. Some physical problems are simply too difficult. Two scientists can examine the same data and come to exactly opposite conclusions about causation.” In

If you’re living in New England and you’ve recently been buried under snow, you probably don’t want to hear how it’s somewhat the fault of (man-exacerbated) global warming. Nor that we can, maybe, tweak the weather to perfection if only we drastically curtail the carbon-emission needed to make boots, gloves

A Saudi blogger has just received the first 50 of 1000 lashes for “insulting Islam.” He’s got 950 lashes and ten years of prison to go. That’s the sentence the Saudis imposed on Raif Badawi last May for criticizing clerics. His blog is shuttered and — because 10,000 lashes and

One day last year, Slate Star Codex blogger Scott Alexander “woke up” to discover that “they had politicized Ebola.” How? It was, he explains, more than just a series of partisan cheap shots. Though there were plenty of those. It was something more startling, and in its own perverse way

President Calvin Coolidge looks more like a sage every day. Confucius would’ve been proud of Silent Cal. Today’s top politicians might take a cue from the man: When you don’t have much to say, say nothing. President Barack Obama, whose popularity in America up until recently rested, in part, on his

Freedom of speech is not the same as freedom from (disliked) speech. One contradicts the other. Not that legal strictures against “offensive” speech would be consistently enforced even if the First Amendment were formally rescinded. In practice, whoever had the most political pull would be issuing the shut-up edicts. Although

We all know about the Salem Witch Trials. But much more recently another, not-dissimilar-enough anti-witch craze plagued us. Remember “recovered memories”? Mass child sex abuse? Satanic rites? Most of it was nonsense. Frances and Daniel Kellar operated a day care business, and found themselves on the wrong end of this

Could it be? We do not live under the Constitution of the United States. The document has been a dead letter for a century, maybe longer. Ours is a Post-Constitutional America. Surely, there have been great moments of executive usurpation. Andrew Jackson, in defiance of the Supreme Court, and against